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Saturday, November 19, 2011

Dear Lord: Please send Einstein back! We're scared!

11/19/11

Dear Readers,

I've been following nuclear issues for more than 40 years -- since I was about fourteen years old. I watched as Three Mile Island unfolded, and then Chernobyl, the loss of the Russian submarine Kursk, and a thousand other events. I'd guess I've testified at over 100 nuke hearings (10 more, and I get a free pizza!) and written over a thousand essays (we'll call this one #1,167, though it may not be). A phone call in the middle of the night on 3/11 from Harvey Wasserman alerted me to Fukushima. (So now I owe Harvey a pizza.)

Suffice it to say, it's not often I read a headline about nuclear dangers that scares the daylights out of me. They all distress me, but I don't lose my daylights (wherever they happen to be) very often. However, here's a headline that DOES scare the daylights out of me:

"Architect of Reactor 3 warns of massive hydrovolcanic explosion."

(Full article and links, below).

Here's my take on it (with a little history to set the scene):

In the fall of 1945 Vern Partlow was a reporter for the Los Angeles Daily News.

After interviewing scientists about the atomic bombs that were used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he became so alarmed that he wrote a song about the dangers, called Old Man Atom.

The song was an enormous hit among folksingers of the time (Pete Seeger among them) but was (famously) banned during the McCarthy Era. (Even the New York Times editorialized that the song's ban was "a threat to freedom.")

The song has a line that describes "the atom" as: "...the thing that Einstein says he's scared of" then goes on to say: "And when Einstein's scared, brother, I'M SCARED!"

If Einstein were alive today, I think he'd be VERY scared.

Of Fukushima.

Professor Haruo Uehara is a former president of Saga University and the primary architect of Fukushima Dai-ichi Reactor 3. Professor Haruo is scared. So I think we should ALL be scared. Not that Professor Uehara is saying anything significantly different from what I -- and others -- have been saying we thought happened in Fukushima, or is happening, or will happen. But now it's coming from someone with very heavy credentials AND close ties to Fukushima Dai-ichi itself.

There may be nothing we can do about Fukushima, but ADDITIONAL nuclear catastrophes can be relatively easy to prevent: Shut the reactors down. Shut 'em ALL down.

Sincerely,

Ace HoffmanCarlsbad, CA

The author was born during atmospheric weapons testing (1956, to be exact) and is an educational software developer. He witnessed the breakup of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) into the NRC and the DOE (1974). He was working at a college news department as Three Mile Island unfolded (1979). He was a computer programmer by the time of Chernobyl (1986). His older brother died of leukemia (1994), then he had bladder cancer himself (2007). Then Fukushima started raining radioactive poisons down on us all (2011). What's next? San Onofre? Indian Point? Or any of a hundred others?

Architect of Fukushima Daiichi Reactor 3, Uehara Haruo, the former president of Saga University had an interview on 11/17/2011.

In this interview, he admitted Tepco�s explanation does not make sense, and that the China syndrome is inevitable.

He stated that considering 8 months have passed since 311 without any improvement, it is inevitable that melted fuel went out of the container vessel and sank underground, which is called China syndrome.

He added, if fuel has reaches a underground water vein, it will cause contamination of underground water, soil contamination and sea contamination. Moreover, if the underground water vein keeps being heated for long time, a massive hydrovolcanic explosion will be caused.

He also warned radioactive debris is spreading in Pacific Ocean. Tons of the debris has reached the Marshall Islands as of 11/15/2011.